Revisiting the tesettür question in Muslim West Africa: racial and affective topography of the veil in Turkish discourses

ABSTRACT

This article studies the discourses about West African Muslim women’s veiling practices that do not conform to social expectations around tesettür (veil/veiling) in Turkey. It combines ethnographic research on the Islamic schools run by Turkish Naqshbandi communities in Dakar, Senegal in 2017 with the analysis of humanitarian discourses circulated by the members of the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH İnsani Yardım Vakfı) in the context of Muslim West Africa. The paper historicises the tesettür question by situating it within the broader women question of the late Ottoman and Turkish modernisation, and by unravelling its entanglements with the colonial library in West Africa. Genealogically, it traces the affects of male puzzlement stemming from West African Muslim women’s perceived non-conformity to tesettür to Ibn Battuta’s travel writings. Having mapped this complex discursive topography, the article explores the tailoring training program developed by a Konya-based Muslim NGO and the intimate technologies adopted by a Turkish female teacher for the transmission of the affect of shame to her Senegalese students. Despite their common gender politics, Sufi pedagogies differ from humanitarian and development projects in their approach to the tesettür question and strategies to address it. The difference lies in their affective registers and processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Turkey
• West africa
• Islam
• gender
• race
• veiling

Introduction

The entry for ‘Africa’ in the Encyclopaedia of Islam published by Turkey’s Diyanet Foundation¹ introduces the topic of religion by classifying African indigenous religions into three categories: animism, fetishism and totemism. After mapping pre-Islamic African spirituality, the entry elaborates on the significance of the social, political, economic and cultural developments culminating from the introduction of Islam in the continent. For instance, ‘inhumane customs such as eating human flesh, sacrificing humans to gods, or burying children alive are abolished, while the naked began to dress and the unwashed to wash themselves’ (Dursun 1998, p. 430). However, these developments were not evenly distributed, according to the entry. Whereas Islamic belief and practice have historically been ‘healthy’ in North and East Africa, the author argues, rural communities situated further away from the centres of Islamic culture and scholarship have remained weak (zayıf), murky (bulanık) and messy (karmaşık) in their faith and lifestyle as Muslims. This is due to the entanglement (birbirine karışmış durumda) of Islam with traditional belief, ‘especially among the natives’ (p. 430). From this description, it is clear that the categories of indigenous or native sit uncomfortably with what truly is considered Islam. The entry traces this uneasy entanglement not only to the persistence of magic, witchcraft and divination in African Muslim communities, but also to the gendered practices of men who have more than four wives and women who ‘do not fully conform to [the norms of] tesettür (veil/veiling)’.

The characterisation of African Islam by syncretism, i.e. the persistence of pre-Islamic belief and practices in Muslim lives, and the association of Islam in Africa with evolutionary progress out of primitivism and savagery in the Diyanet’s Encyclopaedia illustrate the pervasiveness of the colonial library and its permeation into global Muslim imaginaries in the present. The colonial library, as conceptualised by Mudimbe (1988), is not simply a corpus of literature, but a whole epistemic order which continues to shape how Europeans and non-Europeans alike, including Africans themselves, think about Africa. Turkish Muslims, whether organic intellectuals writing within the institutional framework of the Diyanet, or individuals at the grassroots such as humanitarians and teachers think and speak from within the colonial library, even while fanatically positioning themselves and their ancestors against colonialism. In this article, I am specifically interested in the discourses about West African Muslim women’s veiling practices that do not conform to social expectations around tesettür in Turkey.

These discourses emerge from within the global mobilities of Islamic humanitarianism and Sufism that have accelerated under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, hereafter AKP) government and expanded into Africa south of the Sahara over the last decades. As more and more Turkish humanitarians travelled to African countries for sacrificing livestock during Eid al-Adha (feast of sacrifice) and distributing the meat to the poor, or drilling water-wells in villages, a genre of humanitarian writing began to emerge that focuses on the history, culture and religion of Muslim Africa. Unlike the travel literature of the nineteenth century Europe that denied historicity to Africa and attributed radical (racial) otherness to Africans, the humanitarian literature in Turkey pays extra attention to situating Muslim Africa within colonial history – hence singling out European colonisation as the root cause of the continent’s dispossession – while emphasising shared religious identity and a sense of belonging to a common umma (community of believers). This is not to say that the humanitarian discourses are disentangled from the colonial library or the racial formations deeply entrenched by it (Güner 2023). Like the nineteenth century travel writing, this genre too produces a racialised regime of knowledge in the service of a specific (geo)political project. As the following analysis will reveal, Turkish discourses oscillate between complicity and confrontation with the colonial ones and no single object or practice makes this oscillation more apparent than tesettür.

Turkish humanitarians who return from Senegal, Gambia, and other West African countries after the completion of their charity, humanitarian or development work, publish reports about their accomplishments and observations in the magazines of the humanitarian organisations they work or volunteer for. There seems to be a consensus across these reports about the contradiction between West African Muslim women’s piety and their non-observation of tesettür. Furthermore, this perceived paradox compels humanitarians to develop new projects like donating ‘proper’ female clothes to West African women or opening tailoring classes where they can learn how to sew these themselves. The pedagogical agenda of reforming the veiling practices of West African Muslim women is not restricted to the classrooms of tailoring training either. Informal institutions of Islamic learning such as Qur’an schools and formal ones such as Islamic boarding schools run by Naqshbandi communities from Turkey have a similar pedagogical agenda.

These schools belong to the third wave of globalisation of the Turkish Sufi communities, following the expansion of their respective institutions of Islamic learning into Western Europe to cater Turkish immigrant communities and into Central Asia and the Caucasus to contribute to the post-Soviet Islamic revival. There are three major Turkish Sufi communities, all sharing genealogical origin in the Khalidiyya lineage of the Naqshbandi order, whose schools have rapidly spread across Africa south of the Sahara over the last decades. The earliest and most well-known of these are the Gülen schools that have recently came under the radar of the Turkish government’s anti-terror campaign (Angey 2018; Dohrn 2018). In contrast, this article concerns the schools of the understudied and poorly understood Süleyman Efendi Cemaati and Erenköy Cemaati.² Both Naqshbandi communities emerged in the early twentieth century Istanbul that was undergoing a profound transformation from being the capital of an Islamic empire into a major city of a secular republic. Elsewhere, I explored the institutional structure and pedagogical agenda of these schools (Güner 2021, forthcoming). In this article, I analyse the discourses and practices of the educators employed in these schools in relation to the tesettür question in West Africa. In thinking of their pedagogical approaches to West African Muslim women’s veiling practices together with the first-person observations in the humanitarian literature, my aim is to investigate the broader discursive context within which the tesettür question is transported to Muslim West Africa.

This article therefore combines the analysis of humanitarian writing by the members of the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH İnsani Yardım Vakfı, hereafter IHH) with ethnographic research on Islamic schools run by Turkish Naqshbandi communities in Dakar, Senegal in 2017. Studying the development and pedagogical projects that aim to reform veiling practices in West Africa together, it situates the tesettür question within a broader historical, social and political context. The paper first traces its genealogy to the woman question of the late Ottoman and Turkish modernisation in order to make sense of the perceived paradox between West African Muslim women’s piety and veiling practices. It then situates the male puzzlement in the face of this perceived paradox within a longer history of affect by reading it alongside Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth century travelogue. Having mapped this complex discursive topography, the article explores the development and pedagogical projects the tesettür question generates in Muslim West Africa. These include the tailoring training program developed by a Konya-based Muslim NGO and the intimate technologies adopted by a Turkish female teacher for the transmission of the affect of shame to her Senegalese students.

The gendered pedagogies of Islamic education analysed in the last section differ from the forms of humanitarian and development intervention in the way they engage with the tesettür question. Where the male outsiders observe a contradiction or paradox between the West African Muslim women’s piety and sartorial practices, the Sufi teacher I interviewed sees a relational and affective becoming; one that she herself has previously been through. By transmitting affects of haya, which I translate as sense of shame, to her students, she aims to have them feel the need and desire to veil themselves. The Sufi pedagogies based on affective transmission, therefore, reverses the directionality of the intervention from external behaviour, i.e. donating tesettür or teaching how to manufacture it, to internal disposition towards tesettür driven by negative affects.

Historicising the question of tesettür

The tesettür question emerged as part of the widely debated and hotly contested ‘woman question’ in the late nineteenth century (Baron 1994; Kandiyoti 1991). At the turn of the century, Muslim women’s bodies had become a site of contestation through which competing ideologies and conflicting ideas around moral purity and corruption, national progress and decline, gender oppression and emancipation were articulated. The ‘woman question’ was therefore less about women than about modernity, colonialism, nationalism and reform (Yousef 2022). The publication of Qassim Amin’s Tahrir al-mar’a (Emancipation of women) in 1899 unleashed the polarisation around the woman question (Khuri-Makdisi and Dedes 2023). Often (and falsely) credited as the father of Arab feminism, Amin advocated for girls’ primary education and legal reform on marriage and divorce while criticising women’s seclusion and veiling. It was the latter, his call for the abolition of the veil that triggered a major controversy which spread across the Muslim world, leading to the publication of dozens of books and articles responding to Amin’s work (Ahmed 1992). The idea that Islam was inherently oppressive to women and that the veil symbolised this oppression was a colonial invention, which served as a moral justification for domination (Ahmed 1992). As a Europhone intellectual, Amin was more susceptible to the colonial narratives on woman in Islam and deemed the unveiling of Muslim women necessary for the teleological progress towards civilisation, following the path laid out by Europe (Yousef 2022).

The introduction of the Ottoman-Turkish readership to the controversy spurred by Amin’s work occurred not through its translation, but the translation of one of its refutations, Farid Wajdi’s 1901 Al-Mar’a al-muslima (Muslim woman). Serialised in Sırat-ı Müstakim in the wake of the 1908 constitutional revolution as Hamidian censorship was lifted, Müslüman Kadını ensured that the revolutionary slogans of freedom and equality did not extend to gender relations and women in particular; that unveiling was neither supported by the new constitution, nor was it a prerequisite for civilisation (AbdelMegeed and Akcasu 2023). As the book travelled from the British-ruled Cairo to post-revolution Istanbul, hijab, the Arabic word for veil used by Wajdi was translated into Ottoman Turkish as tesettür by Mehmet Akif (AbdelMegeed and Akcasu 2023). While the former is inherently an ambiguous term that convey both figurative and literal meanings by implying at once material and immaterial boundaries, tesettür strictly refers to a sartorial object (AbdelMegeed and Akcasu 2023). The tesettür question, therefore, came to indicate in the context of late Ottoman modernisation the fault line between those who deemed it an obstacle in the attainment of civilisation (quintessentially Western) and those for whom preserving the veil was essential to civilisational survival (Islamic contra Western). As such, the strict implementation of tesettür rules, proposed by the ulama of the time, was part of a broader project of resorting to Islamic law as a solution to imperial decline which they believed was caused by the adoption of Western cultural and moral values at the expense of the Islamic ones (Kandiyoti 1991). It is in this political context that the failure to abide by the rules of tesettür, relegated to the covering of hair, ears, neck and other female body parts in the proper way came to signify an undesirable imitation and infiltration of Western values and material culture.

The gender regime of the Tanzimat era shifted radically with the founding of a secular republic a few decades later. Although the early Republican regime did not legally ban veiling in Turkey, it did establish a symbolic order in which the veil represented inferiority and backwardness as opposed to the progressive aspirations of the modernising state. Furthermore, the locally organised anti-veiling campaigns of the 1930s did reform women’s clothing practices on a national scale in accord with the Kemalist modernisation project (Adak 2022). Islamic revivalism since the 1980s and the AKP’s cultural hegemony in particular have reversed this trend by introducing new veiling practices and popularising the veil among women in Turkey.

By the mid-century, the tesettür question re-emerged, albeit in a different form, under the social, political and legal conditions created by the 1980 coup d’état. A new ‘headscarf issue’ erupted in the post-coup era that centred on the increasing visibility of veiled university students. Soon after taking the power, the military junta adopted a dress regulation that banned headscarf in public institutions, depriving pious female students of their right to education (Olson 1985). With the students’ mobilisation against the ban and the rise of political Islam, tesettür once again turned into an object of contestation and controversy in Turkey. So politically charged the ‘headscarf issue’ was at the time that a newly elected female member who appeared in the Turkish parliament in tesettür lost her seat as well as her citizenship in 1999 (Olson 2000). AKP came to power in 2002 with the promise of lifting the ban on headscarf and formally legalised university entry for women wearing headscarf through a constitutional change in 2007 and public service in 2013 (Kaya 2015). Both these reforms and the headscarves worn by the wives of Turkey’s new presidents and prime ministers were initially met with strong opposition from the secular public. Over the decades, the ‘headscarf issue’ remained as the cornerstone of the AKP’s populist rhetoric, while the headscarf itself moved with the help of its social, cultural and educational policies from the margins of a society shaped by secularist ideology closer to the centre of Turkish national identity redefined through Islamic piety under the AKP’s hegemony.

Another legacy of the 1980 military coup has been the expansion of the Islamic civil society as a panacea to the mass organisation inspired by Marxist ideologies. The neoliberal restructuring of welfare services during the AKP rule furthermore led to the exponential growth of faith-based NGOs (Ketola 2019). These organisations have provided the logistical basis for containing grassroots political instability and mobilising popular support for the regime (Tuğal 2017; Yörük 2022). Internationally, they have worked in tandem with the Turkish foreign policy in the areas of Islamic charity, humanitarianism, development and education (Güner 2021, 2023). Moreover, previously suppressed Sufi orders gained unprecedented public visibility and emerged as legitimate social, political and economic actors in this period. Elsewhere, I analysed the complex relations and exchanges of the transnational Muslim NGOs with the Turkish state and Sufi orders (Güner 2021). In this article, I focus on the Turkish faith-based organisations’ discourses and practices that transport the tesettür question to the transnational and cross-cultural context of West Africa.

Situating veiling in Muslim West Africa

The discourses on tesettür mobilised by Turkish men and women in Muslim West Africa can only be understood by taking into consideration the contested politics of veiling since the late Ottoman modernisation. It is the association of unveiling with Western moral and cultural encroachment in this particular historical context that compels my interlocutors to attribute West African women’s veiling practices to the legacy of European colonialism. In this particular imaginary of Africa, which is shaped by the historical experience of Turkish modernisation and secularisation, Muslim women have abandoned tesettür as a result of anti-Islamic colonial policies. In other words, while Turkish discourses resonate with colonial constructions of African Islam as syncretistic and superficial, at times they also challenge the colonial library by attributing the perceived laxity of tesettür to the degeneration of Islam under colonisation.

However, if there exists a historical correlation between West African women’s veiling practices and colonialism at all, it is probably the other way around than suggested by Turkish discourses. Historically, colonialism not only provided the material infrastructure for mass Islamisation, but also triggered Islamic reform movements, which are most commonly associated with veiling practices that meet Turkish expectations around tesettür. Veiling practices in Muslim Africa has varied across time and space producing diverse local styles (Renne 2013). For instance, the majority of Senegalese women following Sufi tariqas (orders) tie a headscarf made of the same fabric as their dress in a way that leaves their neck, ears and shoulders uncovered, if they veil themselves at all, and wrap a prayer scarf when they pray (Hill 2018; Rabine 2013). For many Islamic reformists who aim to purge customary symbols and practices, local styles of veiling constitute a form of bidaʿ (unlawful invention) that needs to be abandoned for the sake of a return to the pure ways of the Prophetic times (Loimeier 2016). This includes adopting the hijab, the Middle Eastern style of veiling, at the expense of local styles. Therefore, there is a strong association between the hijab and Islamic reform movements in many parts of West Africa. Indeed, it was the Izala (jamāʿat izālat al-bidʿa wa-iqāmat al-Sunna) teachers who encouraged women attending religious classes to don the hijab in Nigeria (Renne 2013, 2021) and Niger (Masquelier 2013) since the late 1970s. In Senegal, the minority of women who don the hijab are called ibaadu, a short form for the reformist organisation, Jamāʿat ʿIbād al-Raḥmān, in Wolof, whether or not they are the members of this organisation which has proliferated in the 1990s (Hill 2018; Rabine 2013). In Gambia too, hijabi women are referred to as Ibadus (derived from the Arabic ‘ibadat, worship), while also differentiated based on their style of veiling: the black full hijab of the Tablighi preachers is seen by others as an import from the Middle East while the shorter and colourful hijabs of more fashionable Ibadus are considered less alien to the local Islamic traditions (Janson 2014).

Although the Turkish humanitarians and educators I study in this paper criticise the veiling practices of West African women and build institutions and develop strategies to reform them based on a particular understanding of tesettür with its roots in the Middle East, they are at the same time different from Salafi reformers in substantial ways. First and foremost, they themselves identify as Sufis and have an ambivalent relationship to the Sufi traditions of West Africa. On the one hand, due to the historical experience of the suppression of Islamic symbols, proscription of Sufi orders, and restrictions on religious education in Turkey, they are struck by these freedoms in West African countries. For example, the abundance of the images of popular Sufi sheikhs in the public space such as the portraits that decorate taxis and shops or graffiti on urban walls in Senegal fascinate Turkish Muslims who in the past might have had to hide such spiritual affiliations. As Villalón (2007, p. 176) also noted, ‘in contrast to Turkey in the period before 1925, for example, the Sufi orders in Senegal have represented a strong form of social organization that has remained uncaptured by the state, yet also capable of engagement and interaction with it’. In a similar vein, primary or secondary school students donning the veil, something the secular education system in Turkey did not allow in the past, thrill them. On the other hand, my interviewees often had something critical to say about the local Sufi traditions such as the veneration of saints. However, these critiques are fundamentally different from the Salafi ones, because the issue for the Turkish Muslims is not about revering one’s sheikh, but about the proper way of doing so. From this perspective, love for the sheikh is desirable, but displaying his image in inappropriate places, such as walking into the toilet with his portrait on oneself or public urination near his graffiti is disrespectful to that sheikh. Even though Turkish humanitarian and educators’ discourses at times resonate with Salafi reformers in their critique of certain local religious beliefs and practices, they are fundamentally different in that they do not target Sufism as bidaʿ, but to purify Sufism from pre-Islamic elements as well as the distortive effect of colonialism. Like the ‘Africa’ entry cited in the beginning of this paper, the Turkish Islamic critique is directed towards the syncretism of Islam with African religions and in that it echoes more the colonial library than the Salafi doctrine which is anti-Sufi in and of itself. Whereas the Encyclopaedia of Islam entry explains Muslim African women’s non-conformity to tesettür as stemming from the syncretism of Islam in Africa, my interlocutors also related it to the cultural legacy of colonialism. All in all, the Turkish Naqshbandis with their reformist agenda in Muslim West Africa complicate the simplistic binaries of Sufism and reformism.

Tesettür problem in humanitarian reports

The recent intensification of Turkey’s humanitarian relations with Africa south of the Sahara has laid the groundwork for the production of racialised knowledge on Muslim Africa in contemporary Turkey (Güner 2023). Revisiting the question of tesettür in West Africa is part of this broader process. To analyse the co-circulation of material aid and racialised knowledge on Muslim women across Turkey and the African continent, I first turn to the aid and charity campaigns of Turkey’s largest faith-based humanitarian NGO, IHH. Analysing the reports written by IHH members upon delivering aid in Senegal and Gambia, I show how the West African Muslim women’s veiling practices are constituted as a problem in the Turkish humanitarian discourses.

As part of its 2015 Ramadan campaign, IHH inaugurated a mosque and a Qur’an school, distributed food packages to 650 families and clothes to 60 orphans in Gambia. After returning to Turkey, Murat Yilmaz, an IHH board member who led the campaign in Gambia wrote a report for the IHH’s magazine. As revealed by its title, ‘Kunta Kinte was here: Gambia’,³ the article first introduces its Turkish readers to the history of slavery, colonialism, Christian mission and decolonisation in Gambia. In addition to this heavy contextualisation and a summary of IHH’s accomplishments in the country, the article provides an informal needs assessment report, raising awareness about the need for constructing a school building in a specific area and for teaching Gambian women how to veil themselves. Yilmaz writes

One of the issues that caught our attention in Gambia was the failure of women’s understanding of tesettür to meet the [Islamic] requirements either due to the hot climate or poverty. These people who run to the mosque wherever they are as soon as the call for prayer is recited, and who excel in their habits of using miswaq (tooth-cleaning stick known to be used and advised by the Prophet), they don’t show the same degree of attention to compliance with tesettür. There is a need to donate women clothes that comply with tesettür while at the same time explaining to them how tesettür should be.⁴

According to his report, Gambian women’s observance of daily prayers and use of miswaq demonstrate their piety which is contradicted by their perceived non-conformity to tesettür. The solution Yilmaz proposes for this tesettür problem as a humanitarian involves donating clothes to Gambian women that would help them properly cover their bodies, and complement these donations with some kind of training in tesettür for them to be more effective.

A similar journalistic report⁵ was published by IHH after the 2006 Eid al-Adha campaign in Kaolack, Senegal. This was an early period in Turkey’s humanitarian relations with Muslim Africa and the author began his account by criticising the mediation of Africa’s image in Turkey by the mainstream Western media. Though his observations did not necessarily challenge the deeply entrenched Western representations of African poverty and backwardness, they included specifically Turkish Muslim sensibilities on tesettür. As usual, the article introduces the legacies of French colonialism and Christian mission in Senegal as well as the resilience of Islam and the popularity of Sufi orders such as the Mouridiyya and Tijaniyya. Again, the author observes a deep contradiction between the Senegalese women’s incompliance with tesettür and their religiosity: ‘Even though women traditionally cover their head with a cloth, this veiling is not in the form of turban (türban) and the majority of the hair remains outside. The phenomenon of veiling is not very common either. What is puzzling is women’s lack of compliance with tesettür in this extremely religious society’.⁶ Failing to fully cover the hair, the Senegalese veiling practices fall short of the requirements of tesettür which are equated with türban by the author. Belonging to a highly religious community, yet not meeting these requirements becomes once again a source of puzzlement in this Turkish humanitarian’s report.

A keen observer of Senegalese society, another IHH member wrote a much longer report⁷ after his trip to Kaolack for the same purpose of distributing sacrificial meat in 2010 Eid al-Adha. As the author encountered Senegalese Muslims who spoke fluent Arabic, he came to appreciate the indigenous system of Islamic education in Senegal in contrast to the Kurdish and Black Sea traditions of madrasa education in Turkey that fail to teach their students Arabic over the course of a decade. This particular social and religious critique was, therefore, more nuanced and went both directions. After introducing Western imperialism and slavery in Senegal as well as the anti-colonial resistance and the popularity of Sufi leaders, the article typically draws attention to the perceived paradox between the Senegalese women’s piety and incompliance with tesettür:

There is a serious tesettür problem in Senegal. The Senegalese women most of whom hold fast onto their rosary, prayer and zikr (remembrance of God), and are very diligent about prayer, paradoxically wear décolleté (low-necked) dresses. We discuss this with the Senegalese scholars and they say, ‘you won’t agree with us whatever we say, unless you stay in Senegal for three months and know our women. As much as we tell them about tesettür day and night, we can’t even convince our wives at home.⁸

The tesettür problem as defined by this author stems from the paradox between the practices and symbols of Islamic piety such as rosary, prayer and zikr and the absence of the ultimate symbol and practice of female piety, that is veiling, as illustrated by the image of a Senegalese woman in a décolleté dress.

What all these three IHH affiliated short-term humanitarian visitors to West Africa understand as the tesettür problem is the paradox between women’s piety (illustrated by the use of miswaq and rosary, diligence in their prayer and zikr) and their immodest clothing which expose their body parts (‘décolleté dresses’, ‘a piece of cloth that doesn’t cover the majority of the hair’). The object of this male puzzlement is not Muslim women who do not comply with the veiling requirements believed to be commanded by God, millions of whom the IHH members knew too well existed in their own country. What puzzles them instead is the perceived contradiction or paradox between the interiority and exteriority of West African women: practicing pious Muslims who do not comply with tesettür. This reported paradox could not be contained as cultural difference or diversity for the Turkish men, but called for a religious intervention in the form of donating proper female clothing or training women about veiling as a way of correcting their perceived misconduct.

This Muslim male puzzlement has a longer history, which predates colonialism. The racial logic underlying the Turkish discourses which I previously traced to the colonial construction of African Islam as a form of syncretism, here need to be genealogically stretched back to the anti-black prejudice in medieval Arab geographers’ discourses. If we are to situate this male puzzlement within a longer history of affect, we need to revisit the fourteenth century Moroccan world traveller, Ibn Battuta’s travelogue, The Rihla, which is among the earliest documentations of a Muslim outsider’s critique and contestation of local practices around women’s seclusion and veiling in West Africa. Ibn Battuta crossed the Saharan desert on a camel caravan and visited the Mali Empire in West Africa between 1352 and 1354. In Rihla, he appreciated the piety of the Muslim rulers and communities he encountered on his journey, their meticulous observance of times of prayer, mosque attendance and dedication to Quranic studies (Dunn [1987] 2012). Some of the ‘peculiar things’ and ‘laughable manners’ Ibn Battuta observed in Bilad al-Sudan (land of the blacks) were the poetic recitations in the court and the throwing of dust on head as a sign of respect to the king (Hamdun and King [1975] 1994, 49, 53). These unfamiliar practices predated Islam, Ibn Battuta noted, but he also rendered them legible as practices of reverence, respect and humility. What was more contested and remained unintelligible in the text concerned the bodily practices and social relations of women. However, it wasn’t only the West African women who posed a stark contrast to the customs of Ibn Battuta’s homeland. Ibn Battuta was equally puzzled to encounter women of the court in Mongol states and Turkish women on the streets who appeared unveiled in the public and were treated with respect and almost as equals to men (Dunn [1987] 2012). Yet, Ibn Battuta’s critique of the Malian customs remained significantly harsher than that of other Muslim societies.

Ibn Battuta found West African women’s companionship with men outside of family and the lack of sexual jealousy on the part of their male partners particularly shocking. He wrote, ‘with regard to their women, they are not modest in the presence of men, they do not veil themselves in spite of their perseverance in the prayers’ (Hamdun and King [1975] 1994, 37). When Ibn Battuta challenged a learned man in Walata for his wife’s conduct that contradicted the norms of sharia (Islamic law) in Morocco, the man responded: ‘Women’s companionship with men in our country is honourable and takes place in a good way: there is no suspicion about it. They are not like the women in your country’ (Hamdun and King [1975] 1994, 39). Revisiting this cross-cultural friction between the two Muslim men, Souleymane Bachir Diagne (2005) reads the latter’s response as a manifesto of cultural diversity within the Islamic world. I am more interested here in the contrast between this man’s response and the response the IHH member in the third example received from his Senegalese interlocutor in terms of racial and gendered dynamics of power. Whereas Ibn Battuta’s interlocutor defended local practices around gender relations to the degree of risking their friendship (the Moroccan traveller refused to see this man again, to whom he was initially grateful for his guidance and protection through the Sahara), the IHH member’s voicing of his Senegalese interlocutor only serves to strengthen his own position, not only by agreeing with the Turkish perspective, but also by his willingness and openness to changing local practices. This contrast helps highlight the significance of the geopolitical context, racial regime and power inequalities entrenched in the humanitarian enterprise. Ibn Battuta and his interlocutor were on a more equal footing as two learned Muslim men, and while the former had certain privileges as a white North African, he still occupied a more vulnerable and dependent position as a traveller. In contrast, the relations between a humanitarian donor and aid recipient are inherently asymmetrical, which structurally makes it harder for the latter to afford expressing views that could cost their relationship. The tesettür question therefore re-emerges within the context of the inherently asymmetrical transnational relations and exchanges of Islamic humanitarianism and education.

Teaching tesettür through tailoring classes

These kinds of critical observations do have repercussions for the Turkish faith-based NGOs’ development and charity work as well as the Sufi communities’ investment in Islamic education, which, among others, aim to reform the clothing practices of Muslim women in West Africa. In this section, I first discuss a development project, a tailoring training for women in Mali, developed by a Konya-based Muslim NGO to address the tesettür question, before turning to the transnational circulation of Sufi pedagogies. Sevap [divine reward] Foundation, as I call it in this paper, is a small NGO that engages in Islamic charity, humanitarian and development aid both locally in Konya and transnationally in the Western Sahel. The NGO extended its activities to Muslim Africa, first in the form of Eid sacrifice, then drilling water wells, building mosques, establishing Islamic schools and sponsoring students, based on the spiritual inspiration its founder, Abdullah Bey⁹ got from Osman Nuri Topbaş, the sheikh of Erenköy Cemaati (Güner 2021).

During my interview with one of the staff of Sevap in 2016, he showed me the photographs taken during the opening ceremonies of the foundation’s development and charity projects in the West African Sahel. As we looked at the pictures, my interlocutor disapprovingly pointed at the way Muslim women dressed and covered their hair in the pictures. This ‘weakness of tesettür’ compliance, as he explained to me, has led the foundation to open tailoring classes for women at the cultural centre they established in Mali. Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, TIKA, provided the sewing machines for these tailoring classes, as it is a common practice of capacity building and women’s empowerment through professional training. However, the objective of these tailoring classes is not strictly economic or social, it is also religious. The NGO aims to reform West African Muslim women’s clothing practices by teaching them not only how to sew, but also what kind of clothes to sew according to the Islamic laws of tesettür.

In addition to the tailoring classes that are held three times a week, the cultural centre provides classes on the fundamentals of Islam and Qur’an courses for women. The NGO also sponsors a girls’ orphanage and dozens of Qur’an schools across the country. The activities targeting girls and women are run either by the three Turkish women who emigrated with their families to Mali or by the West African graduates who studied Qur’an in Turkey. Altogether, these projects aim to disseminate Islamic knowledge and cultivate piety among Malian women while altering their clothing and veiling practices.

Teaching tesettür in Islamic schools

In addition to the informal Qur’an schools, formal education of girls is a key site of reforming West African Muslim women’s veiling practices. The paradox Turkish humanitarians observed between the piety and immodest clothing of Muslim women in West Africa was echoed in the Turkish educators’ discourses during my fieldwork in Senegal in 2017. I interviewed the administrators and teachers employed in the Islamic schools of two of the most active and least explored Turkish Naqshbandi communities in Africa south of the Sahara, Süleyman Efendi Cemaati and Erenköy Cemaati. Although these two Sufi communities diverge in their institutional model and pedagogical philosophy, their discourses on African Islam and Muslim women converge in significant ways.

I met Ömer for interview in a shopping mall in Dakar. He was a Turkish teacher who worked in one of the boys’ Islamic boarding schools that belonged to the Süleyman Efendi Cemaati. Since as a woman I could not visit the schools,¹⁰ and because it was the month of Ramadan, we ironically sat on a bench in front of women’s clothing stores that sell popular fashion brands. As I was rapidly taking notes, Ömer expressed his puzzlement by the unexpected match of the Senegalese women’s dress code and religiosity:

Here, we can neither say they’re in tesettür nor out of tesettür (ne tesettüre girmiş, ne de tesettür girmemiş). She wears a short skirt like this, but she’s wearing a headscarf. She’s wearing a headscarf, but she’s wearing make-up too. There is an usul (manner), an adab (proper conduct) of tesettür. You are either in tesettür or you’re not in tesettür (ya tesettür girmişsinizdir, ya girmemişsinizdir). I cannot see this here. For example, a woman that you’d never expect, [because] she’s dressing very immodestly (gayet açık giyimli), when the prayer time comes, she takes out her sheet from her bag and prays.¹¹

While speaking about the contradictions he observed, Ömer’s hands moved at the pace of his speech, showing the different body parts of women where, according to him, dissonance resided. The destabilising effect of a woman who is dressed immodestly, yet praying publicly was manifested in Ömer’s bodily movements.

My interlocutors’ discomfort with women’s veiling practices in Senegal cannot be understood without taking into consideration the context of Turkey where the social boundaries between the practicing and non-practicing Muslim women are strictly drawn by their dress code. Once again, this shared male puzzlement does not stem from the mere fact of existence of immodestly dressed Muslim women, but from the perceived contradiction or paradox between women’s interiority and exteriority, in other words, their piety and immodest clothing. Teaching the adab of tesettür that Ömer emphasised as lacking in Senegal is therefore a central motivation for the schools of Süleyman Efendi Cemaati. The Cemaat’s pedagogy of adab, when it comes to male students, takes the form of cultivating in them the adab of dressing like an efendi, a gentleman, who wears ironed shirts tucked into trousers, representing the embodiment of a civilised Muslim masculinity (Güner forthcoming).

Erenköy Cemaati puts a similar emphasis on West African Muslim women’s clothing within its institutions of Islamic learning. This might explain why in Senegal, exclusively female students are granted scholarship for Qur’an studies in Turkey while both male and female students are eligible for these scholarships in the case of Tanzania (Güner 2021). When I asked Samet, the administrator of the girls’ Islamic boarding school in Dakar, about the kind of difficulties they experienced when they first started, he responded by saying that female students’ dressing habits (kılık kıyafet) were a big challenge which they have overcome over time. In a similar vein to Ömer, he compared Senegal and Turkey and argued that the differences were not simply caused by doctrinal differences between the Maliki and Hanafi schools of law. Rather, it was the French colonialism that caused serious historical distortions of religion, according to Samet, by teaching them [the Senegalese] ‘just pray your daily prayers and leave the rest’. The overemphasis of colonialism as a determining factor in the cultural and religious differences between the Turkish and African contexts is a common trope which serves to undermine diversity within the global Muslim community in Diagne’s sense and naturalise ‘Turkish Islam’ as the normative one, in a similar way Ibn Battuta once did with ‘Moroccan Islam’. This discursive gesture, in denying agency to African Muslims and lending it altogether to European colonisers, also urges for and legitimises the religious intervention by Turkish Muslims.

Sense of shame: transmission of affects in pedagogical context

It was Saniye, the Turkish director of the girls’ school and Samet’s wife who provided deep insight into the tesettür question as a pedagogical problem. Her perspective differed from the male puzzlement discussed earlier in that it didn’t centre on a perceived contradiction or paradox between the interiority and exteriority of West African Muslim women. Saniye was less invested in imposing a dress code on Senegalese students that would eliminate such contradiction or paradox observed by male outsiders than cultivating a sense of shame (haya) in young Muslim women that would then compel them, almost automatically, to cover their hair and bodies. Female modesty (haya), as conceptualised by Mahmood (2005), is an Islamic virtue that is both created and expressed through the donning of the veil. I translate haya as sense of shame instead of modesty in this particular context. This is because, more than an ethical capacity implied by modesty, haya here indicates the affective response of shame. Whereas female modesty concerns positive ethics, sense of shame belongs to the domain of negative affects. While Turkish men are busy developing projects to teach West African Muslim women the proper way of tesettür, as a Muslim woman who has veiled herself relatively later in life, Saniye’s pedagogical project is to transmit this affective disposition to her students. The transmission of affect takes place in social relationships, altering the physiological and psychological state of the interacting human (and non-human) subjects in the process (Brennan 2004). In the girls’ Islamic boarding school, the transmission of negative affects of the reverent fear of God (taqwa) and sense of shame occurs in the pedagogical context of the teacher–student relationship. There are however limits to this affective transmission.

Saniye grew up in a Turkish immigrant family in France and was not particularly religious until she attended a Qur’an school of Erenköy Cemaati in Istanbul. The affective regime of this pedagogical space was reportedly different than that of the secondary Islamic school Saniye taught at in Dakar: ‘When you enter [the Qur’an school in Istanbul], you’re afraid of your teacher, you pay attention again how you’re veiled’, she explained and compared it to her Senegalese students’ attitudes, ‘it’s not like that here because that’s how her mother is dressed. Nobody says anything. I mean it’s normal for them’. Our conversation clarifies what the tesettür problem looks like for her within the compounds of the school.

Saniye:

We want to pursue on the question of tesettür, but we can’t. Because they say, this is Africa, this is Senegal, it’s hot, we can’t abide these, it’s not in our custom. And they cover it up. They don’t reject anything else. They don’t reject any information you give. They say, right, it’s the command of our God, of our Prophet, but they don’t do this one.

Ezgi:

You mean they don’t do it?

S:

They don’t do it. They don’t listen. We try our best to transmit this in the past seven years, those who accept it they accept it, those who don’t, don’t.

E:

And you don’t say anything about it?

S:

We can’t.

E:

What about the rule of dress code in the boarding school?

S:

Sure, there are. But we try to do it by having them love it (severek yaptırmaya çalışıyoruz). You know, [not by] too much discipline, punishment, [but by] you know using a kind speech, good manners. […] I think, if you say it kindly, they do it more quickly, but if you say do this like a dictator they do it unwillingly (gönülsüz) and it won’t have a lasting effect.

E:

So, veiling hasn’t become a thing like uniform?

S:

Last year, we had uniform. They did all kinds of things [halden hale soktular] with the uniform. They cut the sleeves, they tightened it. We introduced the uniform last year. Then, we asked if they want uniforms again. They said it’ll be the way we want it. You know, they [bunlar] like so much to dress up sexy, too much, you must have noticed. I mean, there are so many unveiled [açık] women, but we feel like looking at them [bakasımız geliyor], rather than at them. To that degree (laughters). So, we decided not to have uniforms this year.

E:

You mean you had the uniforms for one year and they modified it?

R:

They modified it. They tightened, shortened, (she shows how they) cut the sleeves. I mean we have veiling among our dormitory rules, but as I said we have another [Senegalese] director, for instance even she doesn’t pay attention to her veiling. Now when I warn a student, ‘cover your chest’, or ‘sew your slit’, she says ‘our director does the same’. So, how useful is what I say going to be.

E:

How about those who are inspired by you?

R:

Not all students are like that. There are those who dress very properly, and those who won’t, no matter what you do. For example, she wears long sleeves because she’s afraid of me, once we pass this door, she opens it back.¹²

Saniye’s description of her female students’ clothing and veiling practices reflects another instance of the imbrication of Muslim imaginaries of African difference with the colonial library. The image of West African Muslim woman who is veiled, yet sexually more attractive than an unveiled woman harkens back to the hypersexualisation of Black woman in the Western imagination. In Saniye’s framing, female students’ sartorial practices become acts of sexual immodesty such as cutting the neckline or a slit. The Senegalese female students’ changing positions in this interview excerpt from subjects of sexual deviance to objects of sexual desire and control reverberate with deep-seated colonial tropes around African hypersexuality. At the same time, Saniye’s discourses as a female Muslim teacher differs from the male puzzlement at the West African veiling practices analysed earlier. Where the Turkish men emphasise the contradiction and paradox between the piety of West African Muslim women and their outward appearance, Saniye dwells on tesettür as a relational and affective becoming that she herself previously been through within a pedagogical context. In her emphasis on accommodating the local culture in Senegal throughout the interview, such as withdrawing from imposing a uniform or the Turkish table etiquette in the school, Saniye also differentiated herself from the pedagogical project of the Süleyman Efendi Cemaati.

Turkish culture permeated and dominated the schools of Süleyman Efendi Cemaati, according to Saniye. She informed me that the Senegalese students were expected to wear the headscarf in the exact same style that female members of Süleyman Efendi Cemaati did in Turkey and to even wear socks despite high temperature. In contrast to this cultural imposition, she highlighted the preservation of local cultural particularities in the dormitory and the dining hall of the school she was running. Like the uniforms they withdrew, the school administration first introduced tabldot (borrowed from French table d ’hôte into Turkish, a metal food tray with multiple compartments) for the meals, but then resigned it at the face of student complaint. Instead, Saniye and her two toddlers adopted the dining etiquette of the Senegalese students and started eating from the same pot with their hands. In a similar vein, Saniye remarked that the school accommodates students’ local religious practices such as the chanting of hymns on Thursday nights or the celebration of grand màggal, the annual pilgrimage of the Mouridiyya in Touba. She added that the school even bought café Touba to serve the students as customary during grand màggal.

This flexibility does not mean that the tesettür problem is less important for Saniye. She is equally critical about the perceived laxity of her students or the Senegalese women in general when it comes to tesettür. Like her male counterparts, she condemns this laxity as the cultural legacy of French colonialism: ‘like the French, they’re relaxed. It’s just fine if you don’t do it (olsa da olur, olmasa da olur)’. However, she aimed to counter the perceived distortive effect of colonial ideology on Islam not by forcing rules, regulations or restrictions on her students, but by a subtler yet more effective force, i.e. through the transmission of the negative affects of shame to her students. During our interview, she illustrated how her students cultivated a sense of shame and a sensibility for covering their bodies over time: ‘You’ve probably seen that a woman can easily breastfeed her child outdoors. We (as Turks) are ashamed, we try not to show, but them! And when you ask them, they say “yes, we do that, what’s wrong with that”.¹³ In contrast, Saniye marked the transformation her female students underwent in the school by saying that ‘if you ask them now [about breastfeeding], they’d say “no, of course we won’t do that. It’s ayıp (disgrace)”. Similarly, she pointed that ‘for instance, a girl who walks around with a bathrobe freely when others are present begins to cover all her parts in the presence of a man. That’s what we are trying to teach, I mean, the sense of haya’. Solely focusing on the educator’s pedagogical agenda fails to account for the agency of students, the open-endedness of the pedagogical project and the unpredictability of its outcomes (Mashimi 2021). Nevertheless, for the purposes of this article, an analysis of the educator’s pedagogical agenda reveals the intimate technologies developed within a Sufi context to address the tesettür question.

Conclusion

This article studied the Turkish discourses on African Islam and the veiling practices of West African Muslim women in particular. In doing so, it explored the complex and contested relations between the global Muslim imaginaries and the colonial library. On the one hand, there are imbrications between the construction of the tesettür question and the colonial library in that the Turkish Muslims tend to explain non-conformity to tesettür in West Africa as a symptom of syncretism and superficial Islamisation. On the other hand, with its historical origins in the late Ottoman and Turkish modernisation, the tesettür question, when projected onto Muslim Africa, confronts the colonial library in that the Turkish Muslims also tend to explain non-conformity to tesettür as a symptom of the distortive legacy of colonialism on Islam. The analysis of the tesettür question reveals how the Turkish discourses oscillate between complicity and confrontation with the colonial library in Africa.

This article also demonstrated how the tesettür question becomes a productive force. It generates transnational projects such as tailoring training programmes developed by Turkish NGOs to teach West African Muslim women how to dress and veil properly. The tesettür question similarly shapes pedagogical projects in Islamic boarding schools run by Naqshbandi communities from Turkey. Although these pedagogical projects share a common gender politics with the humanitarian and development projects aiming to reform veiling practices in Muslim West Africa, Sufi pedagogies differ from the latter in their approach to the tesettür question and strategies to address it. The difference lies in their affective registers and processes.

In discussing the discourses and practices of Turkish Muslims in West Africa, this article paid special attention to the histories and transnational circulation of affects. Situating the male puzzlement reported by Turkish humanitarians within a longer history of affect, the paper traced its genealogy to the anti-black prejudice of early Muslim outsiders such as the fourteenth century traveller Ibn Battuta. In doing so, it emphasised how the asymmetry of power that undergird transnational humanitarian exchanges shape the construction of the tesettür question in the present. The gendered affects of puzzlement, as discussed in this article, stem from the male outsider’s perception of a paradox or contradiction between the West African Muslim women’s piety and non-compliance to tesettür. As such, it is reminiscent of anthropology’s recent fascination with contradiction in Muslim lives (Fadil and Fernando 2015). Even though Turkish Muslims in West Africa and anthropologists of everyday Islam have very different motivations for their preoccupation with the ways in which Muslims’ mundane practices contradict normative discourses around Islam, they nonetheless share an understanding that these are moments of imperfection (Kütük-Kuriş 2021; Masquelier 2019; Schielke 2009).

The Sufi pedagogies explored in the last section provide a different approach to the tesettür question; one that sees it as a relational and affective becoming, more so than a contradiction or paradox. As opposed to the fractured understandings of Muslim subjectivity that compartmentalize everyday practice and normative discourse while opposing secularity to religiosity, the analytical attention to intersubjectivity exposes this pedagogical process as one of affective transmission. By restructuring their affective sensibilities and transmitting a sense of shame to her Senegalese students, the Turkish teacher reverses the directionality of the intervention into local veiling practices from the external to the internal. Unlike the humanitarians who donate tesettür or teach West African Muslim women how to manufacture it, this teacher works more subtly with negative affects of fear and shame to eventually compel young Senegalese women to veil themselves, if this pedagogical process were to be successful.

Although there are differences between these approaches and strategies, they should be understood as more complementary than contradictory. The staff and volunteers of Islamic humanitarianism and administrators and teachers employed in the schools affiliated with Naqshbandi communities share a common gender politics and a reformist agenda when it comes to tesettür. The binary opposition between Sufism (local, traditional, mystical, and tolerant) and reformism (foreign, modern, scripturalist and militant) within the anthropological literature has long been criticised as untenable (Osella and Osella 2008; Osella and Soares 2010; Soares 2000). The analysis of the Turkish Naqshbandis’ discourses and practices around reforming the veiling practices of Muslim women in West Africa finally contributes to complicating such reductionist understandings.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Francesco Piraino, Shobhana Xavier, Feyza Burak-Adli, Jeremy Dell and the reviewers of this article for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The authors and editors of this special issue would like to thank the Giorgio Cini Foundation and Ca’Foscari University of Venice for funding the conference “Sufism and Gender: Female Religious Authorities in Contemporary Societies” held in December 2021 in Venice.

Notes

1. Diyanet Foundation, ‘a private legal entity’, works in tandem with the official Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs.

2. Cemaat (community), from Arabic jama’a, is the organisational form many Sufi communities have taken since the proscription of the classical form of tariqa (Sufi order) in Turkey in 1925.

3. Yılmaz, Murat. (2015). ‘Kunta Kinte buradaydı’. Retrieved on December 2023 from https://ihh.org.tr/anlati/kunta-kinte-buradaydi

4. Ibid.

5. Ataş, Resul Serdar. (2006). ‘Senegal: Âmin desinler yeter!’. Retrieved on December 2023 from https://ihh.org.tr/haber/senegal-min-desinler-yeter-213

6. Ibid.

7. Tokak, Ömer Faruk. (2011) ‘Ritim Tutan Dervislerin Ulkesi: Senegal’. 2010 Kurban Raporu. Istanbul: IHH

8. Ibid.

9. I anonymise the organisations and individuals in this article.

10. On the challenges of conducting ethnographic research on Süleyman Efendi Cemaati and the specificities of the sartorial discipline and gender politics in the Cemaat’s schools see Güner, E. (Forthcoming). From Istanbul to Dakar and Dar es Salaam: Effendi masculinity, Islamic civility, and the pedagogy of adab. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

11. Interview with Turkish teacher in Dakar, Senegal in June 2017.

12. Interview with Turkish teacher in Dakar, Senegal in June 2017.

13. Interview with Turkish teacher in Dakar, Senegal in June 2017.